Alexander Vindman, former employee of the National Security Council (NSC) of the White House and a witness in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, who was the president of the United States in 2019, is in the pay of oligarchs from Ukraine, said Elon Musk.
„Windman is on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarchs and has committed treason, for which he will be punished,”, the billionaire wrote in X. This is how the entrepreneur responded to the accusations expressed by Vindman in an interview with MSNBC that Russia is using Musk to influence the United States.
Alexander Vindman is a retired US Army lieutenant colonel and former White House National Security Council official. He was born in Ukraine, but moved with his family to the United States as a child. Vindman testifies against Trump as part of impeachment proceedings in 2019.
The reason for this was speculation that Trump had pressured Volodymyr Zelensky in a phone call to encourage Kiev to help the head of the US administration get elected for a second term in 2020. The Senate subsequently acquitted Trump on all charges.
In February 2020 after the failure of the impeachment, Alexander Vindman, as well as his twin brother Yevgeny, who worked as a lawyer in the National Guard Service with the rank of lieutenant colonel, were dismissed. In the summer of the same year, Alexander Vindman, who never received the rank of colonel, left the military service, citing “harassment and threats from Trump and his allies”.
The American media have repeatedly written that Donald Trump, after winning the election, will have the opportunity to settle scores with his former opponents. According to Politico, Trump even had a list of people he planned to get revenge on after he was re-elected.
In late November, The Wall Street Journal said Musk was in regular contact with the Russian side, including Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to the publication, the entrepreneur and the Russian president discussed the possibility of limiting the work of Musk's Starlink satellite terminals in Taiwan. Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said Putin had no contact with Musk since their only conversation before 2022.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that CBS executives refused an interview with the entrepreneur in 2023 because they did not want it to be shown on X without being edited first, journalist Kathryn Herridge said. p>
„In the fall of 2023. offered CBS News an interview with Elon Musk”, she wrote on X. However, the entrepreneur wanted the interview to be broadcast live on X.
According to Herridge, "the channel's management said that the interview could not be shown live, but had to be pre-recorded so that the final product that viewers would see could be edited". As she noted, CBS executives at the time explained the need for it this way: “We don’t know what he’s going to say.”
In the end “everything was just cancelled”. “Honestly, I was so embarrassed,”, she added.
Herridge was fired by CBS in February.